Reproducing Rome: Motherhood in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Statius by Mairéad McAuley (review)

McAuley's book adds to the growing body of scholarship addressing trends in the representation of gender concurrent with Rome's shift from oligarchy to monarchy under the Augustan Principate and subsequent imperial dynasties. The author views those trends from multiple feminist and psychoanalytic critical perspectives that focus on constructions of maternity in Roman epic and Senecan tragedy. McAuley relies heavily on Freud and his progeny, but expands her range of theoretical approaches beyond the usual suspects (Klein, Kristeva, Irigaray) and invokes lesser known exponents and critics of psychoanalysis (e.g., Elissa Marder, Andrew Parker). She handles an impressive range of contemporary theorizations of maternity and an equally expansive swath of mothers, would-be mothers (Dido), or sisters of mothers (Philomela) in Latin poetry. It is unfortunately this expanse, indeed excess, that is the book's most significant flaw: McAuley makes astute observations about the ambivalence of the maternal in Roman imperial culture, but such observations will reward only the most persistent of readers, those staunch enough to endure the labor (pardon the pun) of unearthing them.

The book's introduction identifies the problem of maternity as illustrated in Statius' Thebaid, which uses the speech of the bereft mother Eurydice to call overt attention to the question of what natural or socially constructed features appropriately constitute the maternal. From there McAuley turns to the central question that guides her analysis of literary mothers from the Augustan through the Flavian periods: given that epic mothers, from Virgil's Venus to Seneca's Andromache to Statius' Jocasta, are invented by and largely for men, what might mothers mean in Roman literature? The author's related goal is to expose a fundamental ambivalence, which she traces to Vergil's Aeneid, in the process by which, on the one hand, motherhood is co-opted and transformed into a metaphor that propels the teleological impulse of epic (e.g., Aeneas' search for his antiqua mater); on the other hand, literal, biological mothers are exposed as threatening to masculine subjectivity and accordingly marginalized, but return poignantly and pathologically in texts as reminders of personal loss. Locating this ambivalence as it troubles Augustan maternal representation may have important consequences for readers, who have historically either overlooked ambiguous mothers, or in a well-meaning recuperative act, given them a new, if historically decontextualized, voice. Mothers of post-Augustan literature emerge from Vergil's template, but also react to it by intensifying the threat posed by a mother whose physical body and aberrant desires are co-opted in order to assuage anxieties over masculine virtus. Such anxieties emerge largely from deterioration of the traditional authority of the pater, whose potency was threatened by both the monolithic patrimony exercised through the Principate and by imperial lineage increasingly determined by mothers who could confirm or disrupt the transference of power.

Part I offers sensitive readings of Vergilian and Ovidian epic, though it is in these chapters that the book's characteristic weaknesses emerge. McAuley challenges approaches to Vergil's Aeneid that reiterate the poem's patrilineal tendencies and re-inscribe a deliberate line of inheritance between fathers and sons. Relying heavily on Keith (2000) in the area of Latin epic and Oliensis (2009) on Freudian familial dynamics (and the "textual subconscious") in Latin poetry, McAuley concedes the mortality and materiality associated with "real" motherhood, which must be sacrificed for the generation of imperium sine fine. Figures such as Amata and Dido, however, also allow us to view the poem as "about the loss of the mother, the space she leaves behind, and alternative narrative possibilities …" (71). McAuley identifies the relationship between Cyrene and Aristaeus in the Georgics as a positive model of mother–son relations, countering the more fraught one shared by Aeneas and his divine mother. The chapter's cogency, however, is hindered by unnecessary and unacknowledged repetitions (e.g., discussion of Aeneid 3...